October 27, 2012—Numbers matter. At least that’s one impression drawn
from the inauguration of President Christina Paxson today. The
ceremony, which took place on the College Green under changeable skies
just a few days before Hurricane Sandy was due to arrive on the East
Coast, had its share of notable guests, including Providence Mayor
Angel Taveras, U.S. Senator Jack Reed, and Rhode Island Governor
Lincoln Chafee ’75. ("Brown is a quintessentially Rhode Island
institution," Reed told the audience. "It is fiercely independent and
fiercely unique.") But it was outgoing Princeton President Shirley
Tilghman who got the crowd going.

Frank Mullin/Brown University

After receiving the bling befittiing her office, Paxson addressed the assembled crowd.

Noting
that she and Paxson were now their universities’ nineteenth presidents,
she joked about the significance of the number nineteen. It was not
just any number, she said. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution
gave women the right to vote. And nineteen is a prime number—“not a
multiple of less propitious numbers”—a metaphor for the qualities
Paxson brings to her new job. Tilghman further ingratiated herself with
her Brown audience by describing Princeton as “Brown’s farm team.” Not
only had four of Brown’s last six presidents spent time at Princeton,
Paxson had worked there for twenty-six years before coming to Brown.

Paxson has three qualities that, Tilghman says, make Brown and her
“superbly matched”: the ability to listen thoughtfully, to forge
consensus “whenever possible,” and to make difficult decisions and
stick to them, even if they do not please everyone.

But it was Paxson who was the star of the afternoon. Her inaugural
speech was a passionate defense of scholarly work during a bottom-line
era, when the most pressing question asked about a college education is
whether it will get a graduate a job. Acknowledging the great
importance of that issue, Paxson, an economist, pointed out that today
is not the first time in our history that a recession or depression has
prompted leaders to attack universities for spending too much time and
money on such things as the humanities or basic research

She cited a 1939 speech by Brown president Henry Wriston, who
decried the growing criticisms of universities that arose during and
after the Great Depression. The job of a university, Paxson said, is to
prepare students not only to survive the world as it is today but to
work to make it a better world. It’s Brown place, she argued, to teach
students something “more nuanced but ultimately more valuable” than a
trade, to teach “not just a curriculum, but intellectual curiosity,
integrity, and imaginative thought.”

Frank Mullin/Brown University

"Scholarship," Paxson said, "is uncertain, difficult to measure, and [its usefulness] may not be realized for decades, or even centuries."

She referred to Abraham Flexner’s famous 1939 Harper’s article, “The
Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” in which Flexner argued,
“Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of
curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of
immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not
only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of
intellectual interest.”

Or as Paxson put it, “Scholarship is uncertain, difficult to measure,
and [its usefulness] may not be realized for decades, or even
centuries.” Yes, universities must be in the forefront of solving
today’s problems—she herself became an economist, she said, to
understand the connection between resource allocation and human
well-being—but if universities don’t take the long view in both science
and the humanities, no one will.

As she concluded her speech, people in the audience began to look
upward, first one head swiveling up, and then a few more, and finally
those of the curious all around the Green. Directly overhead, a small
crescent of rainbow had emerged among the clouds.